I know, a LONG time ...

So, it's been over three weeks since you've had an update from Eschatos ... that's very bad, since he really would prefer to have something in here a couple of times a week. Unfortunately, Eschatos has a problem. It's one of those "made of pixels" issues ... when his typist can't make it into Second Life, poor old Eschatos stays "unrezzed", and if Eschatos doesn't rez, he can't go do stuff to report to y'all. It's frustrating for everybody involved, and is always in danger of floating off into metaphysical navel-gazing about the nature of the un-rezzed Avatar!



So, Eschatos begged and pleaded and got onto the schedule. Having nothing "topical" to illustrate, he opted for "tropical" and headed over the Visit Mexico sim, one of his faves. He discovered something over there that he hadn't been aware of previously, now at the "ballcourt" (where he's pictured), they now have animations so that you can bring a bunch of people over and actually play the Mesoamerican "ball game" ... although Eschatos wonders if they have the sacrificial parts of that scripted in!

Eschatos supposes that you're asking what's so important that his typist can't even run him off to the NPC meetings that he'd attended week in and week out for months? Well, it's still a bit of a Big Secret Project ... but one where the tarp's getting pulled off of it about this time next week. Here's a bit of a hint, as he went off to our "DJ club" build to check on what needed to be done there ...



Needless to say, with only a week to go, Eschatos is itching (looks like he's scratching something in that shot) to spew out all the details, but he's controlling himself. He did want me to tell everybody that they could get the general story by checking out Joey Seiler's Virtual World News article which covers the main points. Plus, you can go to the site, http://PlanetsBestDJ.com and sign up (please do!) and be around for all the excitement.

Anyway, Eschatos is sorry that he's been invisible for so long, but he wants me to remind you that he doesn't have a whole lot of say in the matter. Once we get the Virtual World part of this project rolling, he'll have LOTS of news, with celebrities, foreign locales, and all sorts of unusually exciting stuff to report. He's also looking forward to the start of another project that is just waiting the go-ahead, which will be developing a new thing in SL, and has been hinted at in this space previously. Oh, and Eschatos wanted to mention that since he last did an update, there's been yet another Avatrait Gallery Show book published ... to check that out, either go to the Avatrait.com site (do go and sign up!) or to the books site.

Anyway, more later ...

Strange days ...

Eschatos had a very frustrating day. His typist was working from home today, which meant that Eschatos had to deal with rezzing via a Celeron processor rather than the quad-core he gets at the Simuality offices. Eschatos does not like having to manifest through that home system ... he is OK if he stays in one place and doesn't look around too much, but if he has to walk, or fly, or even ctr-alt zoom, it's bad news. Heck, even making/editing things is hard as it takes the better part of a minute just for the edit screen to figure out what's in something!

Fortunately, just about all Eschatos had to do today was go to meetings. Starting off with the regular Friday meeting of the Non-Profit Commons. Now, at that point, Eschatos was already feeling frustrated, and actually timed how long it took for the NPC amphitheater to fully rez once he sat down ... ten minutes! He later had a voice conference with the Avatrait team over in the Simuality conference room, and then an IM conference with one of the track chairs for SL-BaSE ... but at least he was "parked" for both of those.

Eschatos had snapped a couple of pics today, but when he checked them out, there were a lot of "Ruths" and un-rezzed landscaping in them, so didn't feel like sharing. He did, however, take a recent pic of himself over to the ObamIcon site and made this very "Big Brother"-esque image!



Perhaps he could have come up with a cleverer saying, but having things rez was pretty much top-of-mind for Eschatos today! If you were a bunch of un-organized pixels and were being stared at by this poster, wouldn't you try your darnedest to resolve into whatever you were supposed to be? You betcha!

More later ...

Busy, busy, busy ...

Eschatos has been bad about keeping up with posts here ... and he's very sorry about that. Unfortunately, part of the side effect of "big news" (like the new Avatrait Gallery opening, as noted in his previous post), is lots of work which even keeps his typist out of SL for days at a time!

However, Eschatos came into a few Lindens this afternoon (thanks, Track!) and ran around in-world paying his rent. After finally getting the rental box to rez over by his Maxwell Street pad, Eschatos took a bit of a walk-around, and had this snap taken in the lobby of the theater that had recently appeared on the ground floor of his tenement.



The past few days, Eschatos has been very busy creating real-world "swag" for various Avatrait projects ...



Right now there are just two stores up, one with Avatrait Logo stuff (as pictured) HERE, and one with Avatrait Books stuff HERE. Avatrait chief Track Hax has started a contest among the Gallery Artists to have a design for a promo for the gallery, and that will likely be the next of these "swag shops" going up. We are also planning a rather extensive series of "wearable art", possibly in connection with each month's Gallery shows, and are looking at how closely we can parallel the same items in-world!

Anyway, Eschatos didn't want to let this week slip completely by without checking in ... he was very miffed that he didn't end up with any pictures of his presentation to the Non-Profit Commons folks (about the SL-BaSE program) last Friday, but he really wasn't in much of a position to do any snapshots.

More later ...

Another day, another in-world meeting ...

Eschatos has been very active in-world this week, and feels like he's done little else than sit in meetings, classes, and get-togethers! As wonderful as Second Life is for being able to do this sort of thing, some days there is SO MUCH going on that Eschatos wishes he could split his pixels and be two places (or more) at once!

This morning at the Non-Profit Commons meeting Eschatos had a last-minute chance to give a bit of a shout-out about the SL-BaSE conference that Simuality is doing (through the Metaverse Conference Management division) next June out in Portland, OR. Initially there'd been discussion of having a full 15 minute slot, but it turned out that there was just time today for Eschatos to rez and arrange his boards (seen here after I'd been up) and make a bit of a pitch. The "full presentation" has been re-scheduled, however for two weeks hence, and he will then hopefully have some more Track Chairs with him (Coughran Mayo, our Non-Profit track chair, had a conflict today and couldn't make it).




One fascinating thing at today's meeting was a demonstration of Virtual Guidedogs, a sculpted, scripted, assistant for blind users of Second Life! Needless to say, in a largely visual and text-based environment, there are huge challenges for the sight-impaired. These guidedogs provide info about things in the virtual environment in tandem with text readers that turn typed conversation into audio. I guess there are some significant problems still (like logging on ... the form is not audio-friendly) but this was a pretty amazing bit of virtualization!

Just in case you might have had some trouble picking Eschatos and the Virtual Guidedog out of the NPC overhead shot (had to get those SL-BaSE boards in frame, y'know), we've added handy arrows from insets of other pics taken at the meeting ... although I suspect that it might have just been a ploy by Eschatos to get a bigger image of him in the blog!

More later ...

Something to check out ...

Usually in this space we look at stuff that Eschatos has been doing in S.L. ... but today I'm writing to pimp the Grand Opening of the new Non-Profit Commons sim, "NPC2 Aloft" (LINK). The festivities kick off at 12:30pm SLT and run till 9pm SLT, tomorrow, Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 ... do try to get over there to check it out!



Aside from the expected "speechifying" and open-houses at the various Non-Profits whose groups now have offices there, a full program of live musical performances is scheduled through the day, plus lots of "fun stuff" to enjoy. Eschatos is seen here previewing the "magic carpet tour" of the island ... there's also a horse-and-carriage tour, and bicycles that you can rez and ride around the island! In addition, there's a pool, with diving boards, canoes that can be paddled around the outside of the island, hidden waterfalls, and a bunch of other amusing touches.

Of course, a lot of these are going to be on-going attractions of the NPC2 Aloft, but if you want to check out the music, and get a chance to meet a lot of the folks involved, you'll want to try to make it over there during the Grand Opening tomorrow.

More later ...

Lions and Tigers and BEARS!

Eschatos went off to the SLCN taping of a Metanomics show with Beyers Sellers interviewing the Non-Profit Commons' Glitteractica Cookie yesterday. Beyers is actually going to be out at the Simuality real-world offices later today to check out all the stuff we're working on ... so I figured showing up at his gig in-world was the polite thing to do!



Of course, one of the topics being discussed was Glitteractica's "five minutes of fame" courtesy John Stewart (see my April 10 posting for details), something that Beyers (who is a Cornell University economics professor in meatspace) was thinking could be usefully spun to bring in more "entertainment media" to Second Life. He was specifically thinking of "John Stewart's little brother", Stephen Colbert, and, to this end, suggested a "Bear" theme to the audience. As you can see here, many ursine avatars showed up on cue, and Eschatos did his best with wearing the "home team's" colors!



Frankly, I'm not sure exactly what Beyers was implying ... while offering Colbert a lifelike eagle avatar, his "Truthiness Encylopedia", Wikiality, defines bears as: "soulless, godless, rampaging killing machines ... they are Satans minions and the TRUE symbol of the devil and evil", which is not exactly putting out the welcome mat! Maybe Colbert is a Packers fan.

Anyway, this dove-tails with some news which I am likely going to be announcing next week, so watch this space!

Eschatos goes to a public protest ...

O.K., so "protest" is sort of over-stating it ... this was, however, an organized response by the Non-Profit Commons to Jon Stewart's "Avatar Heros" piece, which aired a couple of days ago on the Daily Show.



This piece was nominally about a Congressional hearing about virtual worlds, and ended up focusing on TechSoup/NPC head Susan Tenby's testimony ... largely due to her adding into her "on the record" introduction that her avatar's name is Glitteractica Cookie (Susan and Glitteractica are shown above).

At this point the story veered off from the Congress and focused on the name, with Stewart claiming that he had to settle for "Glitteractica Cookie2" (a joke that continued into the next segment when Nathan Lane claimed that he was "Gitteractica Cookie3") ... ignoring, of course (as had CSI:NY with "Don Juan Two Three") that Second Life avatar names "don't work like that".



Anyway, here is your 'umble narrator in the teeming throng (and in a cameo shot since none of the crowd shots were particularly flattering of Eschatos) wearing a box on his head with a pic of Jon Stewart, up in the "alternative" NPC auditorium over in the new "aloft" (LINK) island expansion.

A couple of folks were shooting "machinima" of the event, which included SLNN.com's reporter Aldon Huffhines' avatar appearing as a dolphin (much like the Daily Show corespondent in the clip, but without the breasts ... just watch the clip), swimming back and forth in front of the crowd. I anticipate that this will be appearing on YouTube sometime soon, or, perhaps, on The Daily Show!

More later ...

What a day ... in-world, yet

One thing about Second Life that I have a love/hate relationship with is the ability to do a LOT of meetings with a LOT of folks ... on one hand, I never had to venture away from my desk today to forge out onto the frozen tundra of Evanston to go anyplace, but I still took 4 meetings over about 5 hours and I'm beat ... I mean, the efficiencies are awesome, but it's hard to say "can't make it" unless things are actually scheduled for the same time slot!



The first of these today was the regular Friday meeting of the Non-Profit Commons (LINK). All sorts of exciting stuff was introduced, including concepts for their new (second) sim, and Rik Riel's announcement about the "Best Practices for Non-profits in Second Life" report (funded by the MacArthur Foundation via the GlobalKids.org group), which he'll be doing a presentation on during the regular Friday meeting (at 8:30am SLT) on February 8th.



The other conference of note that I ran off to was the presentation that Jeff Barr of Amazon.com (Jeffronius Batra in-world) was doing as part of the "GeekEnd" conference that they're running today and tomorrow over at Orange Island (LINK). Barr was discussing some awesome new things that Amazon either has available now, or under development that will greatly improve Second Life (I may be stretching his words, but it sounded to me like he was implying that we may finally have real on-demand sim server scalability coming soon). I'm so glad I made that presentation! The files don't seem to be up yet, but they said that the transcripts (the presentations were in text instead of voice) would be up on their site (LINK) at some point.



One other brilliant thing I picked up today was a way of circumventing the 25-group limit ... I've bitched a lot about having to belong to so many groups in the course of all our development, and having to drop out of others that I would just as well have been in order to keep under the limit ... but what the folks at Orange have done is set up Avatar accounts who are named "EventReminder (GroupName)" and instead of having group announcements going out, there are IMs from the Av, and they have signs to click which automatically "Friend" you with them, effectively giving you unlimited number of announcement outlets ... like the Guinness guy above is saying, "Brilliant"!

Hither, thither, and sometimes yon ...

Well, Eschatos was unexpectedly all over the place today. Frankly, I had a big research project going unattended in the task bar while various places drew our virtual presence. First was a bit of "getting ducks in a row" over at Club Mannequin (LINK) where I snapped this pic of club manager Jada Hoyer getting the music mix together for an upcoming fashion show ...



But that didn't take much of my day, however in the early afternoon, a call went out to the Non-Profit Commons (LINK) group list from Kali Idziak, asking if anybody could come by the sim to act as something of an impromptu "welcoming committee". It turns out that MSNBC had published a rather extensive article about the NPC entitled Pixelanthropy: Charities tap into Second Life this morning, and that quite a few folks were wandering in, having read that.



I hung out there for a while, and then went to check out Coughran Mayo's new island for his non-profit (I don't think they're quite ready for visitors), and then followed up on some really cool in-world features that I'd noticed In Kenzo's phone exhibiting (going over to a build that she'd done for the Canadian "Telus" phone group). Hendry Goldkey, founder of Simuality, has the same phone (a MotoQ) and was very interested in all the stuff Telus had it doing. Needless to say, I'm sort of hoping that this will end up with us all getting "company phones" that will shift phone calls and e-mail in and out of world!

Busy, busy ...

I really didn't think that I was going to be able to be in-world today, as I usually have to take my daughters up to their martial arts class on Saturday, but I needed to do some repair to The Wife's computer, so I got to stay home and she took them.

I actually had four "social events" that I would have liked to have made it to, but the party over at Broadway Live had pretty much wound down by the time I got there, and ditto the "sports gear" party over at Club Mannequin (LINK). Oh, well.



I did make it over to the grand opening of Kiva.org's new space (LINK) over in the Non-Profit Commons (LINK). Kiva is an interesting concept ... they are a "micro-finance" network which allows folks with a bit of extra money (and we're talking as little as twenty-five bucks per loan here!) provide a cash infusion to a third-world entrepreneur who needs a resource for financing. Now, I suspect that the lenders aren't making much cash return on their money, but if they've been able to help somebody bootstrap themselves out of poverty, I guess that's its own reward.



Needless to say, Kiva's very cool and you should go check them out, either in-world or at their web site!

The other thing that I was able to make it to was the mentioned-yesterday opening of the Clarrise Cinquetti show at Avatrait Gallery (LINK).



These opening parties are always fun, with lots of folks turning out ... in the above are Track Hax, Avatrait founder, and Stephen Venkman (with his back to the camera), Avatrait gallery manager.



If you want to check out more of Clarrise Cinquetti's art than you can see in these snaps, drop by the gallery in-world, or at the Avatrait site (where you can buy real-world framed prints of her work, as well as that of the other fine Avatrait artists!).

Anyway, that was my "surprise" social excursion in-world today. Back to your regular programming, I'm sure, in following posts.